


Climbing on Clouds

by Daen, Kage (Daen)



Series: Daen's Story [1]
Category: Dragon Age (Video Games), Dragon Age: Origins
Genre: Drama & Romance, M/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-09-08
Updated: 2013-09-09
Packaged: 2017-12-26 00:01:40
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 8,125
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/959184
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Daen/pseuds/Daen, https://archiveofourown.org/users/Daen/pseuds/Kage
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A Warden comes home with the Blight on his heels, an army in tow, and a love and a war he will not lose. His choices are not easy, but city elves are survivors—and he will do what he must to survive. Companion piece/sequel to The Beak of the Crow. Zevran/M!CE. Trigger warnings as necessary.</p>
<p>The story was first posted on FanFiction.net. I am refining the chapters as I post them to AO3 with the goal of getting them as close to perfect as possible. For those interested in reading ahead to completion, search for "Kage" on FF.net.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

CHAPTER 1

“We can...um, get a room when we reach Denerim,” I mumble over my shoulder. Zevran has followed me into the forest with the usual thinly veiled excuses, and the tips of my ears burn with the knowledge that the others are probably exchanging knowing looks and a lot of irreverent comments right now. And, in Wynne’s case, followed by a hefty sigh and a skyward glance.

His breath falls hot on my neck and an arm cast in bronze encircles my waist, hand resting on my belt. “With thick walls?” he purrs, chest tight against my back. He kisses my ear and I shiver—I cannot help it—and try to wiggle away from him. This only makes him add another arm, wrists crossed, and I feel more than hear the jingle of metal as he works at my belt.

“Zev, no, come on! I’m serious! It’s getting cold, and we need more firewood!” I squeak. How embarrassing. Twenty-one years I have, and he makes those numerals switch places with a single breath. I am trying to stop him, truly, but he has started to nip at my ear instead and this never fails to make me want to collapse immediately.

“And we shall have wood, _amora_.” His mouth smiles against my ear.

“You know that’s not what I meant,” I retort. I don’t want to hurt him, but the loosening of my pants and sudden warmth inside them means that he has won the fight with my belt. Things were going to get very awkward, very fast. So I elbow him in the gut.

“So cruel,” he gasps, bent over in half with his hands on his knees. I fumble with my pants and glare at him. I know he is exaggerating. His abdomen is practically rock, curse him, and I doubt he felt my elbow as much as my elbow had felt his muscles. Meanwhile, my skinny alienage abs are almost as flat and smooth as Morrigan’s, and defined by a visible rib cage rather than muscle. I have a little more muscle on me now than before I left home, but no matter how much I eat and fight, even Leliana has better definition. And then I got poisoned, and I woke up feeling and looking like I had just left the alienage yesterday. Life just isn’t fair.

I rub my tingling elbow, retie my pants and buckle up my belt. How in Andraste’s name does he always undo my laces so fast? I remember how openly he speaks of seducing marks, and I suppose I can only count myself lucky that he decided to go with a plain old ambush when we first met instead of something else. Traps and archers and mages and a crazy blond Crow, I can handle. Hands in my pants...clearly not so much.

He straightens, and I can tell he is thinking the same thing. His face is more transparent to me now even if Alistair still claims we should not trust him. He still guards his thoughts behind a half smile and lidded amber eyes, but at least now I know that that means he is hiding something. I just do not always know what it is.

“Look, we’re really close to Denerim, but we aren’t going to make it if we freeze to death first,” I admonish. We travel with Arl Eamon’s retinue, heading towards Denerim so that the Arl can call the Landsmeet. I do not entirely like or trust him—he is too much like the nobles in Denerim—but I respect that he is a good leader, which is more than I can say for most. There was a sudden snowfall, and many of the wagon wheels froze overnight. Arl Eamon is all smiles for his men, but I can tell that he is getting a little anxious about making it to Denerim ahead of the Blight. His face is fairly hidden behind that beard of his, but his eyes speak volumes. I thought that maybe setting up a lot of fires around the wagons would help melt the ice faster and volunteered to find some wood. He seemed grateful for the suggestion and sent some of his own men out too, although they conspicuously started out in a different direction. I suppose he hasn’t had much opportunity to travel in the wintertime. I haven’t, either, but fire is the only way to get out of the alienage after the gates freeze shut, which they often do in winter.

I have warned Zevran about Fereldans in general and tried to be subtle from the first day on the road with the Arl, but subtle is hard to do when your partner insists on massages and haircuts and very unsubtle attempts at steering you towards his tent. His men politely pretend not to see anything, but Arl Eamon has definitely noticed, and made sure I noticed him noticing. I think he was trying to tell me that I was lucky he was willing to overlook Zev and me for now. Lucky, my foot. I know he needs a Warden who isn’t Alistair, even if the Warden is an elf. Or, worse, an elf with a thing for men, especially one man in particular who is Antivan and a Crow to boot.

I do not know how I will explain Zevran to my father when he finds out, as he surely will. He thought my reluctance on my wedding day was because of nerves. Nesiara was beautiful and smart, and I probably could have been content enough with her. But beauty and smarts alone do nothing for me. I have known this since I was very young. It’s a good thing we’re all practically related in the alienage; no one thought it was strange that I didn’t go bug-eyed around girls. I had almost, with Morrigan...but she was interesting to me in ways I cannot explain. We were not honest with one another.

Anyway, perhaps Zev will tire of me before we even get home.

Maker. The very thought makes me want to slam my head against a tree a few times.

Zevran is looking at me with lazy eyes, and I look back at him, raising an eyebrow to query a silent what? “The firewood is not going anywhere, _amora_ ,” he drawls. I love the way he says that— _amora_ —I do not know what it means, but it is a word he uses only for me. There are other words, _ayana_ and something that sounds like “got-o,” but _amora_ is the one he uses the most. “The world is frozen around us. Look at the trees, the way their slender arms glisten. They are saying to you, ‘slow down, stop as we have, sit with us for a little while and admire our beauty. When the snow melts, you will never see us looking this magnificent again.’”

I do look at the trees, because I can’t help but do what he says when he uses that voice. They are beautiful. I remember how awed I was by the Brecilian Forest when we first entered its heart proper, after we had met the Dalish camped on the outskirts. The whole place seemed magical, like I had just stepped into a completely different world, a city whose buildings were leaves and wood and dappled shade that struck you with patches of hot and cool with every step. When we met our first sylvan, I didn’t want to hurt it, thinking that to do so would be sacrilegious or something—until Alistair reminded me that trees aren’t supposed to move, and Morrigan added that the sylvans in particular were just trees possessed by demons. Abomination trees. _That_ was sacrilegious. At least they didn’t explode.

The forest we are in now is technically part of the Brecilian, according to one of Arl Eamon’s maps, but it is more like a tributary to a river. It is still magnificent. And thankfully werewolf-free. And no bears! Alistair says that they are all asleep right now, which seems strange, as it is still daytime. I am not objecting, though. It would have been very distracting to run into a bear now.

I am glad that I got to see the forest both in the spring of its revival and when it is quiet and painted and carved with frost and snow. The alienage in fresh snow looks like the frosted gingerbread castles Shianni and I used to stare at in the windows of a fancy bakery nobles like to go to, if those gingerbread castles were dropped a few times before the frosting. But the forest is a thing sculpted in the finest design, every tree defined down to its most delicate extremes by lines of white, like my father’s hair-fine curls and whorls of handwriting. Walking through all of this—I could have never dreamed of it, even high up in the boughs of our _vhenedhal_ staring at the horizon. I can’t wait to describe it to Shianni and Soris.

I feel hands on my hips again and jerk back in surprise. That, apparently, is what he is waiting for. He is suddenly in front of me and pushing me back, his lips on my exposed neck before I can breathe, nipping at that spot right above my collarbone that has more than once made me forget where I was and drawn an awkward noise that earned me odd looks from our companions. It works this time, too, but thank Andraste they aren’t around and that the forest can care less. I clap a hand over my mouth anyway out of habit. He grabs it by the wrist and drags it away.

He’s got me now. My back is pressed to one of those trees I was admiring just moments before, and we are knee-deep in a snowdrift piled up against its trunk. I have my hands around his back before I realize it, clawing for a hold on his armor. My mouth is bruising itself on the hard leather on his shoulder and I am crying into it and praying that Soris doesn’t come bounding back to us right at that moment. I had sent him ahead to scout for wood and he ghosted off into the forest a long time ago, leaving Zev and me behind. He can be eerily silent when he wants to be, despite his huge bulk and giant paws.  
I still am not sure how deep a mabari’s bond goes with his chosen master, but while he at least tolerates Zevran, Soris also seems to think that he is challenging him for possession of me. The first time he caught us in a position like this, he dragged Zevran an entire length away from me with a firm grip on his boots and a great deal of snarling. He hadn’t broken skin, but I have no doubt that he could have easily snapped Zevran’s ankle in half.

I can’t get mad at Soris, though. He is as goofy as the cousin I named him after and he is my partner and friend besides. He helped to ease my uncertainty after Ostagar, so far from home; there were ways I could be honest with the dog that I could not with Alistair and Morrigan, and even now cannot with Zevran.

Zev’s hands are busy with both of our pants. I should help him, but I spot the Dalish gloves that I gave him lying in the snow and open my mouth to say that they are going to be ruined. A knee goes between my legs and presses just so in a signal my body recognizes better than I do, and I nearly fall over, gloves forgotten. Everything below my waist is made of electricity, and every touch sends the little prickles of heat coursing anew through my legs. His hand slips under my bottom as I waver on my feet, and his shoulder gets itself under my chin and pushes my face up so that it rests on top instead of inside. The cold air is like a slap to my senses. And then everything gets muddled again as he holds me and I hold him. I whimper involuntarily and it seems like that is the only sound in the entire forest, and I try to swallow the next one while attempting to burrow back into his chest. He won’t let me. “There is no one else here, _amora_ ,” Zevran whispers. “Let me hear you sing.”

He didn’t need to tell me, really; I couldn’t have stopped if I tried. At camp I would muffle myself in his chest, his pillow, his blanket, with my arms or his hands or mine, anything at all—I cannot stop the noises and I do not want to wake everyone. He is so controlled and rarely says anything louder than a grunt or two. But I suppose he was holding himself back all of those times, too. He is talking into my ear now and it is all nonsense, but I have never heard him speak quite so loudly before. His voice is tense and smooth in turns, changing with every motion of mine. Who’s singing to whom now?

The hand that had been gripping my rear leaves and now I am pinned to the tree with just his shoulders and chest. He supports himself with his forearm pressed to the trunk above my head. A shower of frost and bark falls on us and dots his hair with white and brown. His hair has crept partially into my mouth and now there is bark in it, too, but I cannot bring myself to care no matter how ridiculous it probably looks. I am drowning in the heat, the sound, the breathless words and hands and lips and above all of that, the smell of leather and something herbal and spicy and probably deadly in high enough doses. There is always a separate and very particular note of musk in the mix that never changes, as distinct as a signature, and I know it means it’s him. When I wake up to that smell, no matter where we are, I just want to stay lying there forever.

I don’t know who finishes first. Usually it is me, but this time it is too close to tell. He shudders with me and the arm that had been pressed against the tree slips down, bringing with it a fresh sprinkling of bark. I am floating and barely feel his hand cup the base of my head and draw it under his chin. We fit together there, the perfect height for each other. Oh, I wished hard for that moment to last, frozen like the forest around us. But I cough despite myself. I have swallowed some of the bark and it scrapes at my throat with a vengeance.

He steps back and holds me by the shoulders, looking down at me with a searching stare. I need to get him to stop treating me like I’m made of glass! It’s been that way since the poisoning. I know he blames himself, even if he would never say it out loud. Everything is masks and facades with Zevran, and I love him anyway.

Oh, no. I can’t tell him that, can I? It’s on the tip of my tongue, but Zev is elusive and a wanderer and I am always a little afraid that he will leave me if I get too serious. I hide it behind my fist and cough a few more times to continue the charade.

I shouldn’t criticize him for the masks; I am almost as bad. But all alienage elves know that masks maintain that which one is scared to lose. It is how we all survive.

Zevran is waiting for me to recover. I clear my throat. “Swallowed the tree,” I explain nonsensically.

His brows rocket upwards. "I do not recall that happening."

"Hah! Maker. Walked right into that one."

He pats my back while my eyes water and threaten to spill over. I thank Andraste when I hear a familiar _whuff_ in the distance. The warning sound barely gives us enough time to adjust our clothes and armor before Soris comes barreling out of a copse of saplings. He is clutching a piece of tree crosswise between his jaws. It’s somewhere between a branch and a log and we both dance back when he almost drops it on our toes. He sits on his haunches and pants, grinning, his stubby tail clearing the ground behind him of snow with its wagging.

“Good boy,” I say, scratching his giant head behind a crooked ear. I can hardly believe how scared I had been of him when he came running up to us after Ostagar those many months ago, barking like a maniac and launching himself straight into a darkspawn ambush Alistair and I somehow hadn’t sensed. The only mabari I knew before then were the trained ones that belonged to nobles, and it never meant anything good if they were at their master’s side in the alienage. They’re swords with fur and teeth. Soris is so unlike them, all slobbery and smelling to high heaven, and nowhere near as pretty—he saw his fair share of action in the king’s army long before I arrived. But I’m sure he could slaughter a whole pack of those mabari in a fight any day.

Zevran bends over and picks up the branch Soris has found. “Well, I believe our firewood problems are solved,” he says, standing the piece upright like a staff. “A few more of these cut up and we shall have quite a good fire in no time, no?”

“Come on, Soris. Show us where you found those.”

We follow him a few hundred feet into the forest, until he stands waiting for us beside a pile of dried deadwood sheltered from damp by the body of the tree they fell from. I have a sneaking suspicion that he could hear us from here. And no surprise attack on Zev’s dignity? I shoot Soris a sharp look and he looks up at me with his mouth wide open and his tongue lolling everywhere, eyes huge and innocent. Oh, dear. He is always smarter than I give him credit for. I scratch him again and he covers my hand in drool. “Good boy.”

I spare a quick apology to Mikhael and use Starfang to chop the deadwood into manageable chunks for us to carry back. Zevran creates a makeshift frame out of some other branches that we fit to Soris’ back, and we load a good amount of the pieces of wood on top, our belts coming off yet again to lash the wood down. I redo my laces and tie them as tight as possible, and I still have to hold my pants up with one hand while Zevran seems to keep his on through sheer will alone. He watches me struggle while I gather firewood one-handed and grins.

“Not that I mind,” he says, his arms already full of a neat stack of wood, “but perhaps we should purchase you some better fitting garments in Denerim.”

“I just need to put some of that weight I lost back on,” I grunt. “Who knew poison could take so much out of you?”

He turns away quickly at that, but I catch the stillness in his eyes and wish I could kick myself. Even Soris seems to cast a reproachful glance at me.

I have only just managed to balance my own armful of firewood against my pants so that they stay up. So I bump my forehead against his shoulder to catch his attention and stand on tiptoes as he turns to kiss him on the mouth. It is an impulse and I had meant it as an apology, so I fall back to my feet quickly and miss the feel of his mouth against mine immediately, however brief of a touch it had been. I can only hope that it was not the wrong thing to do. Zevran kisses everywhere except the lips, it seems.

When I look up at him, he is staring at me with a half smile and lazy lids, and for once I do not know what it means. Or I do not want to know. “Sorry,” I say, both an explanation and an apology for the kiss.

He turns away. “We should return,” he says. I follow, thinking of how stupid I am. Was. No, am. I can’t help it. He is my first...anything, really. I just don’t know what to do around him, and I hardly think all of those times with the nobles really count as experience.

Maker. Maybe Wynne was right about all of this, that old bat.

Zev drops back suddenly, rubbing the top of my head with the side of his cheek. “We must work on your technique when we find that room you spoke of, _amora_ ,” he murmurs. “I feel as though I have just received a peck from a newly hatched chick.”

I laugh, embarrassment rising in my face. Two leapfrogs one to make me twelve years old again.

We crunch through the snow side by side, Soris trotting easily ahead.

I wish for this moment to last, too.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Trigger warning: Rape

CHAPTER 2

How could I have been so stupid?

I wake up, bleeding and sore, and have no idea where I am. For a fleeting moment I am afraid that my eyes have been damaged, and then realize that the dimness and the flickering is because there is no light where I am save for a few oily torches stuck in sconces out of my reach. I feel naked, and not because I am clad only in my smallclothes—my weapons are gone. The door in front of me is solid iron, as are the bars I am penned within. The ground is gritty, hard stone, and voices scream and choke, begging for mercy somewhere not far from me.

I am alone.

I should have known better.

When the Queen’s maid proposed disguising ourselves as guards in order to rescue the Queen from Arl Howe’s clutches, I had agreed, thinking it was the best idea. Erlina somehow even had a guard uniform that could fit me, although it was still a little long in the arms. I asked Zevran, Leliana, and Morrigan to accompany me. The more humans, the better, I thought, and anyway Zevran and Leliana were trained in stealth like me. It is always a good idea to have a mage, and we could keep Morrigan safe between the three of us if it came to it. I would have asked Alistair as well, but Erlina insisted that our group be as small as possible.

But the disguise was meaningless the minute I set foot inside the estate. I should have known that Arl Howe would not be using his own estate in Denerim. I didn’t remember much of the palace my cousin Soris and I had torn through last year, but I knew this place. And it came back to me in a rush: A distant cousin’s corpse, sneering humans, screams and blood—and Shianni. Shianni, my spitfire cousin, my best friend, lying on a cold stone floor in tears, her face swollen, her throat necklaced with marks left by teeth and callous hands, and bruises all up her legs where the shreds of her bridesmaid’s dress could cover no more. She saw Soris and me enter the room and cried from her heart that she wanted to go home. And everything went red.

Shianni and Soris had never been touched; I made sure of it. I was between the two in age, Soris only a few months older than me and Shianni younger by two years. My mother had told me once that she was training me to fight so that, one day, if it came to it, I could keep them safe. But I had to keep them safe sooner than I knew how to fight off humans three times my adolescent size.

I never wanted them to know what I did for them, because I knew that it would hurt them even more, just as I had hurt when Mother took the strikes meant for me. My cousins had to stay happy and strong. We lived miserably, but no misery would touch them.

And it was gone, gone, all gone. Leaking from Shianni’s eyes and draining from Soris’s face. My wounds had never been.

So I killed Bann Vaughan and his cronies. Used what Mother taught me to slit their throats like the pigs they were. I watched them bleed out at my feet. I put my wedding doublet on Shianni, and Soris found her some pants to wear, and we took her and the other survivors home. And when the guards came, brandishing their weapons and demanding to know who was responsible, I stepped forward before Soris could say anything.

The Joining ritual says that you become a Warden the moment the chalice touches your hands. In my mind, I became one the moment I stepped foot outside of Denerim.

But it hadn’t been enough.

I knew the very first guard we encountered. He had been in the Bann’s employ for a few years, and was a regular in the alienage. Maybe he had been off duty that day a year ago, because I know I wouldn’t have spared him if I had seen him then. He stared disinterested at all four of us before he suddenly seemed to focus on me, and somehow I knew with every fiber of my being that he recognized me beneath the helmet and the armor.

For a moment, I couldn’t breathe. He was the one who would hold his sword to my throat, as if it wasn’t enough that I had already promised I would not run away or fight back, and never did. Him, I associated with shallow breaths and trying to stay as still as possible. But I had a sword now, too, and his was still sheathed at his side.

I realized too late, while his head rolled across the floor, that it was not possible for him to know who I was beneath all of that armor. But it did not matter; our disguises were useless to us now.

Leliana was horrified. Morrigan seemed amused. Both said that I was not acting like myself. They did not know how wrong they were. They had just finally seen the part of me that roiled beneath the surface for the past year, restless with the knowledge of unfinished business.

And Zevran? He said nothing at first. He must have had an idea, even though I still have not told him much about the alienage. He just looked at me as I tore the helmet from my head and threw it at the man’s corpse. He was all half smile and lazy eyes again, and I could not meet his gaze for very long. Then he suggested that we stash our disguises so that we would at least have a fighting chance with our own armor and weapons. I agreed.

We killed every last guard we came across as we worked our way to the Queen. It was too easy. I laughed every time the death belonged to a human I knew. This happened at least five times, and even Morrigan sent me a questioning look at the fifth.

The Queen was trapped behind an ensorcelled door that Morrigan could not break open. On the hunt for the mage responsible, we found ourselves in the dungeon, face-to-face with Arl Howe himself. He had a rat’s face and knew I was one of the Grey Wardens, and seemed to care about nothing else—not about the dead bodies piled high in one of the rooms we passed by, or Zevran hovering behind me, or the plague in the alienage, or that the man he had aligned himself with for power’s sake had left his king and an entire army to die at the hands of a darkspawn horde.

I killed him, too. An Arl is no different from any other human in the end. He said he deserved more. No, he didn’t. Not from me.

We freed the Queen and made our way straight for the estate’s front door. Leliana asked me if I wanted to pause a little, just to breathe, but I ignored her. My head buzzed and I felt unstoppable; no human could withstand my blade that day.

No human except for the small army Loghain sent to stop us, apparently.

Why didn’t I try to talk to them? At any other time, I would have—but not this time, not with everything behind a cloud of red and my gut singing for more. I recognized the woman at their head—Ser Cauthrien—she had been at Ostagar, too, by Loghain’s side. She was just as responsible as her master. Just another human playing with lives like they are pawns on a chessboard.

It was a mistake to attack them. I should have realized it, with the room lined with archers and two mages at the door, and Ser Cauthrien charging right at us with her damnably huge sword. Morrigan got both of the mages before she was thrown off balance by a bolt straight to her shoulder. A guardsman rushed forward and cracked her head with the pommel of his sword. She collapsed as surely as if he had cut her strings. Leliana had tried to block the bolt before it hit Morrigan, but could not get there in time before two more pinned her to the wall. The same guard who took out Morrigan turned and slammed Leliana’s slender body with his shield, and something popped and crunched as she stopped struggling and went still. And Zevran—I do not know what happened to him, because Ser Cauthrien was swinging at me and I had bolts bristling in my sides and one stuck straight through my left hand because I had been stupid enough to try and block it, and all I remembered then was turning my head and seeing a floor rushing too close, too fast.

Oh, Maker. What if they are dead? I shouldn’t have led the mission. Denerim was a trap waiting to explode in my face, with triggers around every corner and flashing on the point of every sword, and in every sneering eye and twisted lip. I knew it, but no one else did. They thought I would be the same Grey Warden they had come to know, and had no idea that inside Denerim’s stone walls I was no longer their Warden—I was only Daen Tabris of the Denerim alienage, desperate and miserable elven trash through and through. No matter what becoming a Grey Warden has changed in me, it cannot change this.

Blessed Andraste, please, please, let them all be alive and under Wynne’s watchful eye. Don’t let any of them pay for my mistakes, least of all Zevran. Their only mistake was following some elf with even less sense than his own dog.

I am not as alone as I thought I was. The cell beside me holds a human, his beard gnarled and gray. I do not know when he has last seen the light of day. His skin is as pale as a fish’s belly beneath the light of the torches and his eyes say that he is on the verge of a mental breakdown. I do not want to know why he is here next to me, although I tell him why I am here when he asks. Let that be a warning to him.

“Where am I?” I finally ask.

“Fort Drakon,” he replies.

I blink in confusion. Fort Drakon is a symbol of Denerim, a towering Tevinter structure that represents power and awe, not a torture chamber. But his answer is as good as any. The location hardly matters in the short term, other than telling me which direction I would have to run in to find my way home again. No one would want me in the fight against the Archdemon now. Alistair could be the Grey Warden Ferelden needed, and be far better at it than I. He has changed since we met his sister, and I think it is the change I have hoped to see in a good man who might one day be king.

I force myself to look around in calmness. I am bruised and sore, but there are no arrows in me and I have been bandaged, if not healed entirely. They intend to keep me disabled, but at least they also want me alive. And I have no intention of waiting here, only to find myself on a torture rack in an hour.

There is a clink of bootheels shifting against the ground and the sound of armor joints rattling together. I peer through the bars of my cage and spot our guard—only one man, stifling a yawn. I do not question my luck. His face is bored and says that he has been given a duty only the lowest ranked peons receive: Guarding defenseless prisoners who are going nowhere any time soon. All he has to do is hold the keys and make sure we are not doing trying to escape. I do not know why he tolerates a job such as this.

He sees that I am awake and eyes me, licking his lips nervously.

Ah, I know that expression. I have seen it many times before, in faces that wandered through the alienage, staring like they are at a butcher’s hunting for the perfect cut of meat for dinner. He licks his lips again and I know what I am going to do.

It is a good thing that Zev and the others are not here to see it. _He_ might understand, and would probably even appreciate it, knowing him, but it is already bad enough that he saw me at the Arl’s estate. This, especially, is a part of me that I do not want any of them to know about.

I hang to the bars of the cage with one hand and rest my head on my raised forearm, and allow a smile to play deliberately across my lips. “Hello,” I drawl. I am channeling Zevran and I have to spare a quick apology to him. “Bored?”

I do not know if he has been told who I am, but based on how quickly he approaches, it is not likely he has. Lucky again. All he sees in the cell is a skinny, mostly naked, and very harmless elf. My captors probably did not expect me to awaken so easily. I have my Grey Warden strength to thank for that, I suppose.

“A little,” he says.

I tilt my head to one side. “Me, too,” I say, and lower my voice to a purr. “And it’s so chilly, too, when I’m all alone like this.” Morrigan used that line on me once. I offered her a blanket and left it at that, too flustered to do anything else. She didn’t like that very much.

It works better on him than it did on me. He almost seems to expect it when he comes to me—he was probably told that one of his little perks is sex with desperate prisoners. It is too easy to get him to open the door and step inside the cell. My eyes note him shoving the keys behind his breastplate after he closes the door behind him, trapping him well within my reach. I look up at him through lowered eyelashes and ask him to take his armor off. He does. He does not take off his helmet, for some reason, but I can see that he is surprisingly young beneath it, and not much older than me.

His hands grip my arms and he turns me around and pushes me up against the bars of the cell. His breath is a wall of heat on my neck and has none of Zev’s artful subtlety, and smells very strongly of tomatoes and onions and fish besides. Standard guard fare. The odor brings back buried memories of times spent on my knees in the dirt of the alienage, where I belonged.

Somewhere in the fort, a voice screams for help. It is pitched high with desperation and barely intelligible, words bursting free with all of the force of steam shooting from a teakettle’s pinched lip. It dies away into a strangled gurgle soon after it begins, so quickly that I wonder if it was only something I heard inside my head.

Perhaps it is the guard’s youth that makes him so gentle compared to others. He could have grabbed my hair or made it harder for me to twist free in many ways, but he doesn’t. I almost feel guilty when I slip behind him and lock my bicep across his throat, squeezing it until he stops struggling and goes limp. He will wake up parched and with a headache in a few hours, and naked in an empty cell, and will probably lose his job in the process. But a boy like him will find another in no time. And hopefully he will be smart enough not to take another guard position.

I release my fellow prisoner while I am at it, if only to spite whoever put me in the cell in the first place. He stands there looking down at me, bug-eyed, the door wide open before him. “Well, go on,” I say. I hope that he has not been locked inside for so long that he is too scared to leave.

“I’m sorry you had to do that,” he says.

I am taken aback and do not know what else to say. “You’d better get out of here.”

He stumbles off in his smallclothes, shouting thanks over his shoulder. He may be a human, but I still silently wish him luck. We both need it.

I still smell tomatoes and onions and fish on me and cannot wait to scrub it off. But for now, maybe it would add some realism to a guard disguise. I inspect the unconscious guard’s discarded armor and, in a cruel twist of irony, it is much too large. What I would give to have Erlina here now.

It seems luck is still with me in some way, however, as I find all of my armor and weapons inside a crate by the door. They were probably going to move it somewhere else. I tear a strip of cloth from my undershirt before I put it on and use it to secure my dagger to my left hand, the puncture from the crossbow bolt in the palm too much for me to hold anything in it without help. In my right hand, I take up Starfang, and as my fingers close over the wrappings on its hilt, I feel whole again.

Except for the smell of tomatoes and onions and fish lingering in my hair. Maker. I wish guards would get fed something else once in a while.

There is nothing else for me to do except stick to the shadows and search for a way out. I try to avoid alerting anyone, but this doesn’t work for long. I run into a pair of mabari almost immediately and their barking brings the guards. I give up on stealth. There is some force at hand that seems to want to make sure I have a very difficult time getting out of Fort Drakon alive.

But I am fine with that. I have to earn my way home somehow.

I spin and behead a mabari and run up a flight of stairs to get some height on my attackers. One of the guards reaches me first and brings his sword straight down at my head—a common mistake, as I do not wear helmets. I am gone long before his blade touches me and by the time it nearly shatters against the stone staircase, I am on his back, shoving my dagger straight through the exposed part of his neck where his armor and his helmet do not meet. Guard armor always has openings at the joints. He staggers and starts to fall. I jump free and take my next attacker, parrying her first swing and taking her sword arm off at the elbow. She stares down at her stump and I axe Starfang’s pommel sideways into her temple. She crumples immediately, her helmet dented.

The second mabari comes barreling out from the shadows and knocks me over, its giant paws on my shoulders and teeth snapping for my throat. I almost break my arm getting my dagger between its ribs, but it is just in time. The dog whimpers and jerks and I push it off of me.

There are voices in the distance that do not belong to prisoners, shouting for reinforcements. I shoulder Starfang and set my jaw. Guards are always humans. Yes, this is fine indeed.

By the time I make it to the Fort’s chapel, I am tiring and very tempted to go inside to lie down a little. A Grey Warden’s stamina has its limits, and I am reaching them fast. I did not know how tiring it would be to fight alone. Blood drips down my legs and gathers in my boots, and my right arm is wet with it as well. If Mikhael hadn’t been so clever about Starfang’s hilt and overall balance, I would have lost my grip on it at least twice.

I peer in through the open door. It is a typical chapel, lined with candles and benches, and complete with a sister kneeling before a statute of Andraste. The sister is bad news; I trust only one in all of Denerim, and this one is not she. I will not find rest here. I want to fall over in despair. I wonder if I will be able to lift my sword again after this.

I look up into Andraste’s face before I turn, although I do not know why. I was raised Andrastian but never feel welcome inside a Chantry, even as a Grey Warden, the unease ingrained in me after years of getting chased away. In Lothering, I finally saw Andraste up close in a Chantry, and She seemed then, as She does now, to be at peace. One hand rests upon Her chest, over the heart She dedicated to the Maker, and the other rises with a flame balanced in the delicate palm, as if it is that very heart that She extends skyward for Him to take. The sight reminds me of our journey to find Andraste’s Ashes, and my surprise at learning of Shartan in the Gauntlet there. His was the one riddle I did not answer correctly, the wrong answer spilling out of me in my excitement at seeing an elf. Alistair didn’t let me live that one down.

Leliana told me a little about Shartan, later at camp. Was it out of love for the Maker that he followed Andraste, I wonder, or did the pain of his people win out in calling him to Her side? Hers was an undertaking only the insane or desperate would follow.

These are unkind thoughts. Shartan brought elves out of slavery under the Tevinter Imperium. No matter what his motivation, we all owed him that much. I cannot help but wonder how different my life would have been if his name had not been expunged from the Chant after the March on the Dales, if my family had just a little bit of hope that elves had once fought on equal ground beside humans. I gaze at Andraste’s tranquil face and ask for strength in finding my own freedom.

A familiar shout and a peal of laughter catch my attention and it is only a bruise on my neck that keeps me from spinning around any faster. What are Alistair and Morrigan doing here? And why have they not torn each other’s throats out yet? I drag myself to the doorway and find them finishing off a squad of guards, Alistair resplendent in the heavy armor he prefers, Morrigan’s hand aloft and ablaze like Andraste’s. They see me before I can hide and the relief in their faces is palpable and undeserved.

“There you are!” Alistair exclaims, rushing forward. I want to collapse in relief at seeing his big grin, all thoughts of finding my way home forgotten. I had not trusted him when we first met, but we had been thrown together by fate and grown side by side in ways more lasting than even the evolutions between childhood friends. He is the brother I never had, the one I could count on to protect my back while I had his. We have our differences and I had had a moment of mistrust after I found out he had decided it unimportant to tell me that he was a potential heir to the throne of Ferelden. But I forgave him in the end, and even felt a little hopeful about the future afterwards. With my brother on the throne, there was a chance elves would not be in the alienage for much longer. Maybe I would have a better life to go back to after all of this was over.

Unless he knew about how I nearly got our friends killed in the Arl’s estate. Something inside me falls and I sway on my feet, the world spinning around me.

He puts his shoulder under my arm and lifts me before I can stop him. “I can walk,” I manage to croak, but he ignores me.

“We need to get you to Wynne,” he says. He turns and Morrigan is there, lifting a hand to my arm. It is still warm from the ball of flame she held in it only moments before, but soon it is warm with the calming light of her small amount of healing magic instead.

I look at her, her yellow eyes narrowed in concentration and thought, and my heart skips a beat. She is beautiful in ways I wish I could explain, her confidence and arrogance only increasing her wild allure in my eyes. But the love I have for her is very different from what I feel for Zevran, even if I had thought it was the same in its early stages.

“Are you okay?” I ask her, my voice embarrassingly creaky, like an old man’s. I try to find a wound on her head, but there is none to see through her dark hair.

Her gaze flickers to me as she takes her hand away and moves it to my legs, deftly rearranging shreds of leather to find the cuts I bleed from. “We are all well,” she replies. “The Queen brought some of her guard back for us after Loghain’s men departed with you, and the insufferable one took care of our wounds. ‘Tis good that you are not too badly harmed.”

“We were expecting to rescue you ourselves, not greet you at the door,” Alistair explains.

“Is Leliana...and...and Zevran...”

“Leliana flits about Eamon’s estate driving us all mad with her useless twittering, and your elf is recovering nicely,” Morrigan informs me.

“Recovering nicely and nearly strangled me when we said he couldn’t go with us. Maker, I do _not_ know what you see in him.” Alistair shakes his head. “Is that good enough, Morrigan?”

“’Twill hold him for now.”

The world is fading away. They are all right. My exhaustion has caught up to me and my eyes can barely stay open. Alistair is moving, and every step feels like I am being rocked to sleep.

“Ugh, I realize this is going to sound completely moronic coming from me, but you, my friend, need a bath. Like, really. You smell like...onions. And _fish_. And really bad tomatoes. I guess the cooks here don’t know the proper way to stew them, huh?”

I can’t bring myself to care about how I smell now, or where the smell came from. Alistair can make even the Deep Roads seem like a stroll through the woods. I wish Soris was here, too. I could use one of his slobbery kisses and his comfortingly huge bulk between my arms.

I am adrift, and set all thoughts aside for now.


End file.
